


with the sun in my eyes you were gone

by birdsofthesoul



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Men of Letters (Supernatural), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Corruption, M/M, Pining, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:53:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22951303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdsofthesoul/pseuds/birdsofthesoul
Summary: “I want you to stay,” he said, and it came out like a plea. Because fuck Sam Winchester. Benny was the one who found Dean, and it only stood to reason that he’d get to keep Dean for a little longer. And — “When you came to me, you told me that I was the only person you had left in this world. Well, that was a two-way street. And maybe that’s no longer true for you, but it still is for me.”
Relationships: Benny Lafitte/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22
Collections: Dean Winchester Big Bang 2020





	with the sun in my eyes you were gone

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank-you to my artist [Huntress79](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntress79/pseuds/Huntress79)! Please go show her [art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22959124) some love!

Dean was still sleeping when Benny got back with the coffee. He’d dispensed with the covers in the suffocating summer heat, and he’d even removed his jeans, so he was only clad in a t-shirt and a pair of boxers. Benny could see the faint scars from Sam’s ritual on Dean’s skin. He’d known about them, but only academically; Dean had worn long sleeves almost religiously ever since they’d reunited a few weeks ago, and Benny had never caught more than a glimpse or two.

He approached cautiously now, and when he placed the tray on the nightstand, Dean stirred, but he did not wake. Benny couldn’t say if it was curiosity that wouldn’t allow him to leave well enough alone, or if it was a deep-seated suspicion of anything that had to do with Sam, but as soon as he’d seen the sigils, he knew he wouldn’t be able to let the matter go. Quickly, surreptitiously, he snapped a few shots of the scars with his phone and sent them off to the Avilas. And then he leaned in to shake Dean awake.

Dean came to slowly. “What’s the time?” he mumbled into the pillow, and Benny told him that it was still dark outside. But they wanted the cover of the early morning gray if they were to leave without the motel manager noticing, and Benny was of the mind that the less attention paid to them the better, now that Walker and Kubrick were on their trail.

“I’m up,” Dean said, and he rolled out of bed, all mussed hair and barely open eyes. He patted the sheets aimlessly until he came across his discarded jeans, and then he pulled them on haphazardly, blinking all the while to get the sleep out of his eyes. Benny watched him sleepwalk to the bathroom to begin his morning ablutions, and glanced down at his phone when he heard the door click shut.

The sigils didn’t look Satanic, but neither did Sam.

When Dean came stumbling out again, he was a little more alert. “Stop gawking at me,” he said, a little snappish. “I told you already, I don’t know what the sigils mean.”

Benny didn’t have the heart to tell Dean that he was only painting Sam in a worse light; he was tired of arguing, and they really needed to get a move on. “Last I heard, Walker was still sniffing around Ventura,” he said, waiting for Dean to lace his boots. “I figure he thinks we don’t have the funds for Santa Barbara.”

“We don’t anymore,” Dean said. “Where are we headed to next?”

“Well, I don’t know. Where do you think your brother’s headed? You said he might be hiding out in the Santa Barbara chapter house, since you’re pretty tight with the Harvelles, but Ash said he’s pretty sure your brother’s headed back to Kansas.”

“He’s not gonna go back to Kansas without me,” Dean said with a certainty that Benny wasn’t feeling at all. “If he’s not in California, he’s probably hiding out at Rufus’s place.”

If Sam had the brains Dean always said he did, he’d be sticking it out in Lawrence, because the most dangerous place was usually the safest, or so common sense dictated, but the Winchesters had an odd relationship with Kansas and Dean did know his brother best.

“Vermont or Montana?”

“Montana,” Dean decided. “I don’t think Gordon knows about the cabin.”

“Montana it is,” Benny said.

He hustled Dean out the door and into the car, and then they sped off into sure disappointment, because Sam Winchester wasn’t going to be found once he’d dropped off the map.

*

Benny first met Dean Winchester at the Lebanon branch of the Men of Letters.

He’d driven three hundred miles out of his way to argue about his stipend, which had seen steep cuts over the past year, and after he’d expressed his deep displeasure to Bobby Singer, the man had just grunted and directed him down the hall and into Room 11.

Room 11 was a bedroom.

Benny despaired that the Men of Letters would ever understand efficiency. Or professionalism.

The door opened before he could knock.

It was a boy — roughly his age, give or take a couple years — and when he saw Benny, his face fell comically. “You must be here about your stipend,” he said, looking crestfallen.

“Lemme guess — you can’t do anything about it.”

“’Fraid not, man,” the boy said. “Bobby’s hashing it out with my grandpa, but the odds don’t look good.”

“Bobby directed me here, so there must be _something_ you can do. $25k a year is abysmal, dude. It barely covers room and board, let alone gas, and we still gotta buy our own weapons.”

The boy looked stricken. He opened the door wide and ushered Benny inside. “Which branch do you belong to?” he asked, booting up his laptop.

“Officially, Texas. Unofficially, Santa Barbara.”

“All the hunters affiliated with the Texas branch are getting paid $35k,” the boy said, pulling up the Texas database. “What’s your name?”

“Benny Lafitte.”

“Dean Winchester,” the boy said.

“John Winchester’s boy?”

“Yup.”

“All your cousins are with the Texas branch then?”

“So is my little brother.”

“But you’re not.”

“Nah, I’m training to be a Man of Letters. In the meantime, I keep this place running.”

Benny gave him an once-over and came to the conclusion that the boy was wasted on accounting. But it wasn’t his place to comment, and it wasn’t like the hunting life was anything to write home about either, so he waited for Dean to work his magic on his finances and looked around the room.

There was a picture of two boys on his desk — Dean, and presumably his brother. There was no sign of the Campbells, which marginally improved his opinion of Dean. The Campbells were good hunters, but they weren’t very good people, and Benny’s mother always said that she couldn’t figure out for the life of her how that old turd managed to produce a girl as sweet as Mary Winchester.

“All right,” Dean said, “there might be something I can do to give you a raise. But just you though.” He looked half stern, half apologetic. “I can’t do anything about your friends, your family—”

“I’m just asking for myself,” Benny interrupted. “My old man has other ways of making money, but I prefer to keep my nose clean.”

“Right, well, this isn’t _totally_ clean,” Dean said a little sheepishly. “I’m putting you under Dean Campbell from the Rhode Island branch.”

“You can do that?”

“Technically, I’m on call for hunts throughout the year. I’ve done a couple with my dad and brother.”

“So I’d be taking your pay.”

“You’d be taking my earning potential. The $35k is a cap on how much I can earn, not how much I bring home at the end of the year.”

“Fair enough,” Benny said. “Listen, Dean, you’ve been a great help today. Hit me up anytime you need a hunter on a case.”

Dean smiled at him. “I just might take you up on that.”

*

Montana was a bust.

There was no sign that Sam had even used the cabin, and as soon as they re-entered civilization, Dean called Bobby from a payphone and begged him to ask Bela for help.

“Bela’s ways won’t work if he’s using a hex bag,” Benny told him after he hung up.

“Sam doesn’t know how to make a hex bag,” Dean said. “Dad always said that kind of magic was beneath us. Anyway, Sam’s always been more interested in hunting than the academic side of things.”

Word on the street was that Sam was running around with a demon named Ruby after she’d rescued him from Walker, but Dean said that his brother would never pal around with one of those black-eyed sons of bitches after what happened to their mother. He thought it was possible that Sam disappeared in Texas, but then he said that he wouldn’t put it past Sam to hide out in New York or San Francisco, because their dad always said that the wilderness provided silence, but the cities granted anonymity.

“When he was eighteen, he almost applied to Stanford,” Dean said.

“What stopped him?” Benny asked.

“I didn’t want to move out west, and he didn’t want to leave me.”

“Would you have followed him to Palo Alto if he did go?”

“Maybe.” Dean looked thoughtful. “If I thought that Dad could spare me.”

“And if he couldn’t?”

“Dad never meant for us to be separated,” Dean said with finality. But he lacked the clear-eyed faith with which he spoke about Sam, and then he turned away, like he couldn’t bear to keep talking about his father. “Anyway, it’s all academic now.”

“So you think he’s in the Bay Area?”

“Maybe. He’s always had a thing for the hippies.”

“The hippies don’t really hang out on the Haight anymore.”

Dean closed his eyes, like he thought he could reach out to his brother telepathically if he wished hard enough, and then he said, “The Met.”

“The what?”

“The Met,” Dean said. “In New York. We used to say — did you ever read _The Mixed-Up Files?_ I forgot the full name — I’m pretty sure there was a Mrs. Basil, or something like that, but that’s not important. It was a story about two kids who ran away from home to live in the Met. For the first few chapters, anyway. I used to read that to Sam every night. We used to pretend that we lived in the Met.”

“So you think Sam’s skulking around the Met, waiting to meet up with you?”

“Don’t say skulk,” Dean said with a frown.

“Sorry,” Benny said, but he wasn’t really sorry at all.

“It’s worth a shot,” Dean said. “I can’t think of any place else.”

The Winchester boys hadn’t really been anywhere else. That was the worst tragedy of it all, Benny used to think, when the news of the boys’ survival hadn’t reached him yet. All those years spent rattling around the bunker like a couple of modern day hermits, only to be ousted and chased into exile by their own family. It was almost Shakespearean, except Benny didn’t like to think that way.

Shakespeare wrote a shit ton of tragedies, and even if this was going to end bloody one way or the other, Benny liked to imagine a softer ending.

Like the one in _The Mixed-Up Files_ , or whatever children’s book the Winchesters used to read.

*

Money was the last nail in the coffin.

Benny’s old man had predicted the rift years ago when Samuel Campbell had nearly come to blows with Bobby Singer over what constituted as an adequate hunter’s stipend, and even though John Winchester had sided with his in-laws in the end — because what was the hunting community if not a hotbed of nepotism — funding allocation was an evergreen argument, and the debate flared up every few years.

Which was why John Winchester hit the road three days into the new year and left his twenty-five-year-old son to deal with the Santa Barbara chapterhouse and its accusations that Campbell had committed embezzlement.

It wasn’t a serious accusation, Campbell insisted. Or rather, it was a serious matter because it was _slander_ , but the accusation itself was ultimately baseless because there was no written documentation that Campbell had struck a deal with Ellen Harvelle two years ago, which was what Santa Barbara claimed.

Benny had zero doubts that Winchester would have dismissed this claim right out of the gates if he hadn’t been responsible for putting Bill Harvelle in the ground five years ago, but he had, so now he had to do _something_. Make things right, he’d ordered Dean right before he’d absconded for a nice solitary hunt. I’m counting on you.

He probably should have asked Sam to arbitrate if he’d wanted the scales to tip in Campbell’s favor. Dean had other ideas in mind.

There was no documentation, Dean conceded readily, but he didn’t need a piece of paper to conclude that Harvelle wouldn’t have sold those thirty acres to the Lebanon branch for a dollar if Santa Barbara hadn’t been promised a decent slice of the profits.

And the financial records showed that Santa Barbara had gotten zilch. Ninety percent of the profits from the subsequent development of the land had gone to the hunters and the Texas chapterhouse, which was a gross breach of contract. Seeing as how the Campbells made up the largest hunting family in North America, Ellen had probably been right on the money too when she’d accused Campbell of misappropriating the funds.

“I called Montana,” Sam reported a little sulkily. “They said they’d already spent the funds.”

“They shouldn’t have,” Dean said immediately. “The deal was that they’d get the funds, but we’d get the final say on how the money should be spent. Whatever they bought, they never ran it by us.”

“Well, they’ve already hired a curse breaker to clear the backlog, so that money’s gone.”

“What about the hunters?”

“Seriously?” Sam scowled. “You’re gonna try to _defund_ the hunters? Dean, these are the guys who risk their asses _every day_ , and you wanna tell them, what, oops, sorry, gonna need you guys to cough up the cash we just handed you?”

“Benny,” Dean said, “You’re a hunter. You and your old man see a single dime?”

“Got wind that your grandfather was going to buy hunting gear from the Brits.”

“You receive anything?”

“I thought that was coming out of his own pocket,” Sam interjected. “Gwen told me about the new tech. It didn’t pan out because someone stole the shipment.”

“The shipment disappeared?” Dean said, incredulous.

“I don’t think Gwen would lie,” Sam said.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Dean said. “But I still owe Ellen a quarter million to set up a research institute in Santa Barbara and unless we get Texas to cough up part of the funds, I won’t have anything to placate her. She said on the phone that Ash is onto something big.”

“You live in a bunker full of antiques,” Benny pointed out. “You also have storages full of very expensive cursed objects. You can’t sell a few for emergency funds?”

“None of those things belong to us,” Dean said, utterly exasperated. “And the cursed items are locked down because they’re cursed, I’m not gonna have them sold to an unsuspecting public because one of my relatives helped himself to heaps of cash!”

“Well, you can’t mint money,” Sam said shortly. “Unless—”

“There is no unless here,” Dean said. “We’re just gonna have to drive up to Montana and talk to Rufus. And then we’re gonna pay Campbell a little visit and talk about those rare books he’s got, and how he feels about making a donation to the Santa Barbara branch.”

*

The car broke down in Ohio and Benny started seriously considering grand larceny.

“We could steal an old junker,” he suggested.

“I don’t want the cops on our backs,” Dean said. “We’re fending off my mom’s family, Gordon, every crazy Campbell’s got in his pocket. We don’t need anyone else hounding us.”

“We need money. And you’ve been cut off from all of your accounts.”

“Well. I have an emergency fund.”

“You have it on you?”

“Yeah. Let me look — I think I have it in my jacket.”

“Is it a blank check?” Benny asked, watching Dean pat down his pockets.

“In a way,” Dean said. “You remember how Sammy wanted to mint money?”

He held up a small curse box.

“You’re gonna sell that?” Benny asked, flabbergasted. “What about the unsuspecting public?”

“Actually, I’m thinking about using this on myself.” Dean tilted the box so Benny could read the faded label. _Rabbit’s foot_ , it read in John Winchester’s neat handwriting. “Life’s been so shitty lately, I figure I’m due for a run of luck.”

Benny grabbed the box from Dean. “You know that luck goes sour?”

“Not for about thirty hours. We’re not too far from a 7-11, and if we hustle, we can buy a couple of scratchers before shit hits the fan.” Dean snatched it back from him and tucked it back into his jacket. “C’mon, no time to waste. I wanna be in New York by the end of the week.”

*

They never did get around to visiting Campbell.

John caught wind of the whole thing and shut it down before it got out of hand, and Benny cleared out right after the yelling started. He called Dean two weeks later on a payphone, and it took thirteen rings before Dean answered, but when he answered, he sounded tired but fine.

“Dad shut down the investigation,” he said right off the bat. “Tell Ellen and Jo I’m sorry, but I tried.”

“It’s not your fault,” Benny said immediately. “I figured your dad wouldn’t want to go against Campbell. He still feels guilty about your mother?”

There was a long silence from the other end.

“It’s not that,” Dean said at last. “Anyway, listen. I’ve been thinking, and there might be a way to get Ellen the funds she was supposed to get.”

“You’re gonna sell the antiques?”

“Something like that.”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Benny said, because that wasn’t why he called at all. “Where are you now?”

“At home. I got put on research duty after that night.”

“Your dad tear you a new one?”

“Not really.”

But he didn’t elaborate, and Benny took that as a sign to back off. “How’s your brother?” he asked instead.

“He’s on a hunt with Samuel,” Dean said darkly. “Both Dad and I thought that was a terrible idea, but Samuel insisted, and you know how Sammy’s always preferred him to our grandfather.”

“Well, he _is_ the kid’s namesake. That’s gotta mean something.”

“That means our mom had our dad wrapped around her pinky. Anyway, he’s up to no good, I just _know_ it.”

“You want me to tail him, don’t you?”

“Where are you now?”

“Scranton. Observing how paper gets made.”

Dean exhaled in relief. “You’ll get there in time then.”

“Where are they now?” Benny asked, dropping in another quarter in case the conversation got cut off.

“Maine. They’re working a case in Camden, that weird boarding school that looks like it’s half B&B and half little school on the prairie.”

“All right.”

“Thank you,” Dean said, and the sincerity in his voice made Benny flush.

“No need for that, brother,” Benny said. “I’ll check on your brother and let you how things are going.”

He’d left his cell turned off in the car because he had a suspicion that his old man had another job lined for him, and he didn’t want it, not before he finished this one thing for Dean. In retrospect, it was one of the dumbest decisions he’d ever made, but at the time it made him feel like a good friend. Loyal. Devoted.

So it was that eight hours later, he pulled up at the boarding school to find it up in flames. He gaped at it wordlessly, and then turned on his phone to call Dean and ask if _Sam_ had maybe called with more details, but Dean wasn’t answering.

Dean didn’t answer for the rest of the night.

The next morning, his old man called and told him that he needed to get his ass to Colorado if he wanted to see his boy alive. “Elkins has a package for you,” he said shortly. “Bring that straight to me, and I might be able to get the Winchester boys out of the bunker.”

“What happened?” Benny asked numbly.

“No time for explanation. You better hustle, that Campbell is one bloodthirsty sonuvabitch.”

Elkins was already dead by the time Benny crossed the Colorado border. He received another call when he was crouched over Elkins’s dead body, and when he picked up, it was Samuel Campbell, telling him to find the Colt and bring it straight back to Lebanon.

“Where’s John Winchester?” Benny asked, bristling.

“Dead,” Campbell said curtly. “The official death certificate says car accident, but I’ll bet you anything that he was making a deal with a demon.”

“For what?”

“I’ll be damned if I know.”

“Where’s Dean?” Benny demanded. “He’s next in succession.”

“He’s dead to me, and if you have any sense, you’ll shoot him with the Colt when you see him next.”

And then Campbell hung up without another word, and Benny sat motionless in his car, listening to the dial tone and wondering where the brothers could possibly run.

*

It was possible that Sam was hiding in New York City, but it was equally likely that Sam was actually in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or Dallas, and it was actually more likely, because New York drained their funds in two days, and Benny doubted that Sam could have lasted for more than a week.

“Maybe he’s gone back to Nebraska,” Dean said in a diner in Connecticut. It was mostly empty at two in the afternoon, which Benny thought was a reckless time to grab lunch, since they weren’t exactly inconspicuous figures. The waitresses would remember them, and with their luck, Kubrick would probably eat here tonight and hear the ladies gossiping.

But Dean insisted on visiting the suburbs in Connecticut, where the fictional Mrs. Basil resided, and this time, he thought to visit the first hotel listed in the phone book. It didn’t do much good, and now he sat across from Benny in a dirty booth, picking at a slice of cherry pie. “He left me there,” he said disconsolately. “Maybe he meant for me to wait, and now he’s pissed ‘cause I disappeared.”

“I think Sam would have left you a note if he wanted you to wait,” Benny said.

“Maybe he didn’t have time to leave me a note.”

“He could have doubled back later. Anyway, if he really wants to find you, all he needs to do is call your number. You’re not the one who ditched all the phones.”

“I still can’t believe he did that,” Dean admitted. “I keep thinking that the only way he would have done this was if he never really left. Maybe he just went into hiding, and then I left him.”

“You think he’s been tailing you since?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, that just doesn’t make sense to me,” Benny said. “What were you two doing in Nebraska anyway? If I were on the run from some people in Kansas, I’d be hightailing it to Alaska or Hawaii. Maybe even Canada.”

“Gordon fried my heart with a taser. Sam couldn’t let me die, so he took me to a faith healer.”

“Thought those were all phonies.”

“Yeah, well. His wife had a reaper on the leash.”

Benny digested this news for a bit. “Did Sam know?”

“About the reaper? No.” And then: “I wouldn’t have let him if we’d known.”

“Even after your dad sold his soul to bring you back to life?”

“Especially then,” Dean said shortly.

“It’s probably a good thing you didn’t know then,” Benny said, and he knew that Dean understood all the layers of meaning he hid in that one sentence, because he fell silent and he didn’t speak again until they reached Nebraska.

Ophelia texted him right before he went to bed.

_You found Dean?_

_Is he okay???_

_Why hasn’t he come home yet?_

Benny texted her back quickly: _u know y_

Ophelia sent him a row of question marks.

And then in a quick flurry:

_No? Sam killed everyone who was hunting him._

_The Campbells, Walker, Kubrick, Roy, Walt._

And finally, most damningly:

_Didn’t he tell you?_

*

Benny didn’t return to Lebanon.

He took off for Louisiana, where he knew a witch who sold him a talisman to keep the hunters off his trail, and then he went back to Lawrence, where he heard that both the Winchester boys had died in the coup.

Sam was evil, the Campbells said. Tainted with demon blood. He was turning into a demon, so Samuel decided to take a stand for the greater good, and when Dean got in the way. Well. He was the first to go. Gwen swore that Sam flung Christian into the wall and cracked his skull through the force of his mind, and she said, hand on Bible, that she saw the boy’s eyes turn yellow, like old Azazel’s, and Samuel said that Sam was the reincarnation of Azazel, and that he had clawed his way out of his mother, only to burn her to death on the ceiling six months after his birth.

It didn’t matter that Sam had been named for him, or that he had worshipped Samuel, or that he’d been the one to tip John off when Dean had been investigating Samuel. It didn’t matter that Sam saw him as blood and loved him as blood.

As for Dean?

Dean, who had been the spitting image of his daughter?

Well, Campbell said, he defended her murderer, so he wasn’t fit to be her son.

He never liked the Winchesters anyway, and he only wished he’d found the Colt and emptied it into John Winchester’s skull before his daughter had married the piece of shit.

*

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was the first thing out of his mouth as soon as he saw Dean, and it should have sounded a lot more accusatory, except he was fucking heartbroken because all of this — the lies, the omissions, the secrets — all of this just meant that Dean didn’t trust him. Not really.

“The hell you talking about?” Dean was giving him that look again. The one with the cocked eyebrow that said he had no clue what Benny was banging on about, but he’d humor him because that was just the kind of thing Dean did. Put up with lunatics.

Christ. Talk about salt in his gaping wound.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Benny said. “Your brother’s singlehandedly taken out half of the hunters in North America. There’s _no one_ on your trail, because everyone out for your blood is six feet under! You didn’t think about mentioning that right before you dragged me all the way across the country _twice_?”

“The fuck you talking about?”

“Are we seriously going to do this?”

“Do what?” Dean snapped, and Benny couldn’t help but marvel at his acting skills, because he was really fucking good when he put his mind to it.

“I’ve talked to Ophelia,” he said, tossing his phone to Dean. “The jig is up.”

Dean scanned the messages quickly, and then a thunderous expression crossed his face. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he muttered, and then he looked up at Benny with wide pleading eyes. “You don’t believe this, do you?”

Benny gaped at him. “Believe this — of course I believe Ophelia! She’s _working_ for Sam right now, why wouldn’t I believe her? Here—” he grabbed the phone and scrolled down so Dean could see the incriminating evidence for himself — “Yeah, starting from here. Go on, read them.”

He watched Dean mouth the words to himself a few times, first incredulously, and then for some inexplicable reason, _hopefully_ , and he felt something in his chest crack wide open.

“I would still have helped you, you know,” he said, and it was only after he heard himself talking that he realized what he was saying was true. “If you’d just told me the truth. None of that Gordon Walker hunting you down bullshit. If you came to me and said, ‘Hey, man, I need you to help me look for Sam,’ I’d still have dropped everything and helped you. I owe you that much.”

Dean looked at him blankly, like he was having trouble understanding what Benny was saying, and when the light bulb finally went on, he had the gall to look angry. “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know. Sam must have taken him out sometime in the last two months. Christ, Benny, you’ve been watching me go out of mind with worry. You really think I’d have put you through this hell if I’d known?”

Yes. Fucking yes, because Benny _knew_ that Dean hated being alone more than anything else, and if Benny was good for one thing, it was companionship. _Loyal_ , devoted companionship, like he was a fucking dog or something.

He didn’t say anything, but Dean must have read it on his face, because his eyes softened, and he pressed closer so that his shoulder was touching Benny’s. “I wouldn’t,” Dean said softly. “C’mon, Benny, you know I wouldn’t.”

Maybe. It was irrelevant at this point. “So now you’re a free man,” Benny said roughly. “What do you wanna do now?”

Dean didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Benny already knew the answer — Dean would want to cut this trip short, probably. Go running to Rhode Island, back to the satanic brother who’d watched them run around like headless chickens, only stepping in at the very last minute through a text from Ophelia. Dean was a fucking masochist through and through.

But so was Benny, apparently. “I want you to stay,” he said, and it came out like a plea. Because fuck Sam Winchester. Benny was the one who found Dean, and it only stood to reason that he’d get to keep Dean for a little longer. And — “When you came to me, you told me that I was the only person you had left in this world. Well, that was a two-way street. And maybe that’s no longer true for you, but it still is for me.”

Dean went very still.

_Fuck it_ , Benny thought, and then he took a step forward and pressed his lips against Dean’s.

*

In Louisiana—

Dean came out of nowhere like the ghost Benny thought he was, and all he said was, “I need you.”

Benny was working as a line cook and for the first time in his life, he had his own apartment. He had his own checking account in a reputable bank and the balance was actually coming close to five figures. He’d cut ties with his old man. He’d gone no contact with all of his old hunting buddies. He’d cut all things hunting related out of his life.

“You’re all I have left in this world,” Dean said, and Benny dropped everything.

Never looked back.

*

Eileen found them the next night.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Took me a while, but reports of two guys winning ten scratchers are kinda hard to miss.”

“So Sam’s been looking for me?” Dean asked quietly.

“Ever since you got separated,” she promised.

“Bullshit,” Benny said later, once Dean had gone out to get food. “Dean said Sam took off after Nebraska. That’s how they got separated.”

“He wanted Dean to come and find you,” she said.

“Why? He had my number. Could have just texted.”

“That wouldn’t have worked.”

“Why the hell not?”

She gave him a long, unreadable look. “Tell me,” she said at last, “when did you get together?”

_Last night_ , Benny wanted to say, but it wasn’t strictly true. Dean had stood still and let him kiss him, and after a while, he’d even kissed back a little. But then he’d broken it off and muttered something about Andrea, and in the end, Benny had gone to bed alone.

Andrea was history, but Dean didn’t know.

“It’s a work in progress,” he said.

Eileen nodded slowly. “I probably got here too early,” she said, but she gave him a look that said otherwise. “It’s the last ingredient in the spell. Blood of a lover.”

“What spell?”  
  


“The spell to resurrect Dean completely.” She gave him a sad little smile. “What? You didn’t think that John selling his soul actually worked?”

“That’s what Dean told me!”

“That’s what Dean _thinks_. His father made sure he’d stay breathing, but that was it. Sam had to do the rest of the work.”

“And he’s missing my blood,” Benny said, numb. “How much does he need?”

“All of it.”

He stared at her.

“Have you noticed how his hands are always cold?” she asked, staring out the window. “His body’s shutting down. He’s going to lose his senses, one by one. Sam bought him a few more months.”

Just long enough to start something he couldn’t finish.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, turning back to look at him with her big dark eyes, “Dean has no idea.”

“I know,” he said.

“Have you two—”

“What? Slept together yet?”  
  


She nodded.

“No. Not yet.”

“Well then. I guess what happens next is up to you.”

He laughed bitterly. “Not gonna force me?”

“No,” she said simply. “I was the one who came because I wanted to give you a choice. I wanted to give Dean a choice.”

“You’re gonna tell him?” he asked incredulously.

“You don’t think he deserves to know?”

“He’d never agree if he knew. Fuck, you’re taking away his choice if you actually tell him—”

“And that’s his choice,” she said, steely.

He opened the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked in surprise.

“Asking you to leave,” he said brusquely. “Come back in the morning if you want to tell him. I want one more night with him.”

Eileen was a smart girl. She gave him a hard, bruising hug and then left without another word.

He waited until her rear lights disappeared from the parking lot, and then he texted Dean.

_Hey, when are you coming back?_

*

Dean never texted back.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song _In a Crowd of Thousands_.


End file.
